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HL Mencken and George S. Schuyler Marion H. L. Mencken and George S. Schuyler Marion Elizabeth Rodgers (Baltimore Bar Library, Mitchell Courthouse, Baltimore, MD., March 10, 2016) Thank you, George, for being so gracious, and for inviting me to this elegant and important library, and for assigning me this topic. Last month there was a wonderful piece in The Baltimore Sun about the journalist and writer H. L. Mencken, by G. Jefferson Price, saying how Mencken endures because his commentaries have such relevance, especially now, during the presidential campaign. (1) I have to say that in the last few months, every time I watch the Democratic and especially the Republican party debates, I have often wondered what Mencken would have made of the spectacle, and especially what Mencken might have thought of his fellow German American, Donald Trump. I just learned the other day that Trump's great grandfather was from Kallstadt, a village in the Rhineland. In Germany, the people from this town are affectionately known as Brulljesmacher, meaning “braggart.” (2) Mencken would be having a field day right now. But the topic tonight is not politics, though there will be some. It is about Mencken's friendship with George Samuel Schuyler, one of the most famous African American journalists of his time. Called “the black Mencken” (3) Schuyler, like Mencken, was an iconocolast. Both were proud, cultured, self-taught and opionated. In their newspaper columns, both men championed racial equality, liberty, but especially, individuality. George Schuyler was the son of a cook; his mother was a housekeeper. His parents stressed the values of education, hard work and self-reliance; and while he was brought up in in a Rhode Island neighborhood where whites outnumbered blacks, he never found this racially isolating, though he did wish to see blacks in a position of leadership. At age 17, Schuyler joined the Army, became a first lieutenant, and worked odd jobs until he became a newspaperman. He was one of the first black reporters to write for leading white publications, among them Mencken's The American Mercury, The Nation, The Washington Post and elsewhere. He was also one of the first black foreign correspondents, traveling throughout the United States, Africa, and South America, writing about the situation of blacks in Liberia and Brazil. Because of his satirical style and unique point of view, Schuyler was much in demand until his reputation dimmed during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. He died in obscurity in 1977. (4) Lately, however, Schuyler has been experiencing a revival among conservatives, who have been praising him in The Weekly Standard and elsewhere. (5) Even Cornel West, who is, as a liberal, politically, the very opposite of Schuyler, has called Schuyler's autobiography a classic in African American letters. (6) There have been recent studies on Schuyler published by professors from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the University of Albany in New York, but when they mention Mencken's association with Schuyler, they do so almost apologetically. (7) Now I have to pause here because those of you who are relatively new to H. L. Mencken –- and you cannot be from Baltimore and not know or at least have heard of Mencken – probably simply associate him with the notorious Diary that was published a while ago. (8)To that I can only cite the excellent speech made at the Enoch Pratt Free Library two years ago by one of your members, the Baltimore civil rights lawyer Larry Gibson,reproduced in this excellent little booklet which David Thaler published, called Mencken's Prejuidces Debunked. (9) Mr. Gibson asked: was Mencken a racist or civil rights champion? Here was a writer, as Larry Gibson pointed out, who used racial slang and racist language and not only about African Americans, but in describing all ethnic groups. He was, as Mr. Gibson said, “an equal opportunity slur monger.” (10 )He freely insulted Italians, Catholics, Irish, Jews, Dutch, and especially Southern whites. Yet in his newspaper columns and books and in his actions, Mencken not only wrote against segregation, he took on the Ku Klux Klan and lynching, even going to Congress to testify for an anti-lynching bill. In the combat between the emerging blacks of the South and the ruling white trash, said Mencken: “I sympathize greatly with the Negroes, and have done what little I could to help them.” (11) Throughout his career, Mencken had always been fascinated by the relationship between the races. How could he not be? He was from Baltimore, a city that had one of the largest urban black communities in the United States. Baltimore had three times more African American dwellers than Philadelphia and six more times than that of New York. Behind his house in Hollins Street, in West Baltimore, Mencken knew the black families who lived in houses in the alleys. By the time Mencken was a newspaper reporter, in 1910, relations between blacks and whites in Baltimore had detierorated to such a degree that the mayor feared riots and bloodshed. (12) When it came to finding a solution to the race problem, Mencken could find none. His editorials of that time called for a discussion of what he said was among “ the most important and perhaps most depressing of American problems.” (13) He repeatedly wrote of the short sightedness of Baltimore's white leaders when it came to issues of housing and public health, and in 1915 called upon the city to stop excluding African Americans from the discussion of public reform, and to start electing them to the city council. (14) During World War I, as a German American who had experienced discrimination himself, Mencken's sensitivity towards the black man was heightened even further. Whenever Mencken was in New York – which was once every month-- he met with black intellectuals, reading their newspapers, and he continued writing about racial themes. To Mencken, nothing could be more ironic than the drafting of blacks to save the world for democracy and now denying them every vestige of that democracy. There was more segregation, more violence, more race riots, more lynching, than ever before. (15) When the first world war ended, much of New York's cultural power came from the fact that the city had become a mecca to the thousands of African Americans who had emigrated from the South. (16) No other city during the 1920s was as receptive to black talent as New York was...and no other white cultural figure was as receptive to black talent as H. L. Mencken. Mencken even considered launching a monthly magazine dedicated to a black audience, that, unlike The Crisis magazine, would not cover just politics but also the fine arts. This last point is not well known, but I discovered Mencken's enthusiastic description for such a publication among the papers of Mencken's friend and co-editor, George Jean Nathan. This would not have been unusual for Mencken. Anonymously, Mencken had launched various magazines to great success as a side source of revenue—the most famous of these was his detective magazine called Black Mask, which featured stories by James Cain. Mencken's enthusiasm for a possible monthly that featured fiction by black writers and focused on the culture of black America is in keeping with his encouragement of their work, both behind the scenes and in his writing, notably in one of his most famous essays, “The Sahara of the Bozart.” (17) Mencken was also tireless in his efforts to bring the work of African American writers to the attention of white publishers, especially to his own publisher, Alfred Knopf. At Mencken's urging, Knopf had published Walter White's first novel, The Fire in the Flint, and reissued James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. (18) Now, George Schuyler was among those African Americans who had moved to New York City during the 1920s. By then, he was writing a monthly column for Harlem's weekly newspaper, The Messenger and for The Pittsburgh Courier, the nation's second largest black circulation newspaper. Mencken regularly read both newspapers, and invited Schuyler to contribute to The American Mercury, a new magazine he had started in 1924. (19) The aim of Mencken's American Mercury was to publish articles that no one else dared to print. His goal was for the magazine to serve as a platform to introduce one kind of American to another. Contributors were the famous and the unknown. They included hobos, doctors, lawyers, a bishop, a US Senator, even convicts. “Half the crooks in the United States seem to be going in for the beautful letters,” Mencken wrote to one of his girlfriends. “I have to be polite to all of them, poor dogs!” (20) Subjects were not just literary; they ranged from science, law, theology, music, the immigrant press, to theater. At a time when black writers were not featured in white publications, Mencken was the white first editor to explore the complexity of black life. From 1924 to 1933, the years when Mencken was editor, the American Mercury published over 50 articles about African Americans, written by whites and blacks, more than all other magazines combined. (21) George Schuyler became one of The American Mercury's most prolific contributors, and was among those whom Mencken admired most. Very few white columnists, wrote Mencken, could match Schuyler for “information, intelligence, independence and courage.” (22) Mencken approached Schuyler with an idea: “I'd be delighted to see him ['the Nordic'] dosed with the same kind of medicine that he has been giving the Ethiop for so many years.
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